Quiet Admin

Month: February 2023

  • Ubiquiti Enterprise

    Ubiquiti Enterprise

    I have been working with technology since before gigabit networks were standard. I remembered transferring files just to see how fast they would go. Today, with Thunderbolt, and 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps USB gigabit ethernet seems so slow. I’ve been holding off on upgrades because the cost versus benefit didn’t seem worth it to me.

    Recently, I setup my custom rig, which has built-in 2.5 GE, and connected It to my modem that has a 5 GE port, and there was an improvement to speeds and responsiveness. Regrettably, I didn’t benchmark it, so I don’t have tangible figures to share.

    At this point, I already had a Ubiquiti U6 Enterprise AP, and I was dying to see how upgrading that to a 2.5 GE would improve my experience. I upgraded my firewall, my NAS, and added the 8 port enterprise switch.

    I am a bit annoyed at the moment. The new switch is no longer providing PoE. My WAP is back on GE PoE. Switching is otherwise functioning as expected. My new NAS is connected via 10GbE, and I have been transferring files to a from and very pleased with the faster speeds.

    I have started the RMA process with Ubiquiti, and will make a new post when that process is complete, and will run some benchmarks on speeds when uplink via GE versus 2.5 GE.

    Edit: Ubiquiti did respond to my RMA request next day, and approved it. Unfortunately, there isn’t an advanced replacement option that I can see, so I’ll be shipping it off.

  • My Cameras

    My Cameras

    I’m now on my fifth body. I started with the modest Olympus E-510. A 10 MP, 4/3rd system (Sensor & Mount). After a few years, I upgraded to the E-620, same 4/3rd system but with a 12 MP sensor and an upgraded AF system. I should have done some more research before that purchase though. I liked the higher resolution, but it was noisier.

    Despite being a DSLR, the Olympus cameras were very small, as were the lenses and they were easy to carry about. I, however, started having issues with the AF system. I also found manual focus without focus assist to be difficult for far away subjects. These struggles and mounting frustrations led to me falling out of photography for a while.

    After a few years, I was dying to get back into things, but I really wanted a new camera to address my frustrations. Pretty quickly, I was looking at mirrorless systems due to their EVF. I know for many photographers, the EVF is a travesty. For me, having focus assist in the EVF and that the image would change to match the set camera settings were very desirable.

    After much research, thank you dpreview.com, I settled on the Sony a6400. It hit the right price, all of the features, and was well reviewed for photo quality. This is an APS-C sensor with the Sony E-mount for lenses. I had purchased this with the 16-55 kit lens, but shortly thereafter I purchased the 70-350 G lens. The kit lens was pretty soft, so I upgraded it to the 16-55 G lens.

    After a few years, I was wanting to upgrade to Full-Frame, and I had a trip to Yosemite coming up, so I opted to pull the trigger. I first opted for the Sony A7 mark 4. This was brilliant, but the location assist annoyed me, and at the same time Sony had a massive discount on the camera I really wanted. The Sony A7R mark 4. I returned the a7 in favor of the a7R, and I was in heaven.

    With the move to full frame, I needed to upgrade my lenses, too. I started with the 24-70 Sigma Art, and the 70-200 G lens. After a bit with them, I did return them and I upgraded to the 24-70 G Master (mark 1), and the 100-400 G Master.

    I have been very happy with the results on these upgrades. I love the 61 MP images.

  • WordPress on Synology

    WordPress on Synology

    I’m fond of Synology in general. It is an affordable and capable solution. I wanted to start a website, and although there are a lot of affordable hosting companies out there, this wasn’t really something I wanted to spend extra money on.

    I already had a Synology, and I knew they had web station, so I went to package center, and there was a WordPress package, along with MariaDB, PHPMyAdmin and PHP.

    I installed all of the apps, and immediately I had a functioning site. I was excited and got to work. I have done a lot of web server management at work, and my first thing was check site health and see what it had to report. It noted that I was unable to check for updates, but everything else was showing okay.

    I was content, and began to proceed. Next thing was installing some plug-ins. Two of the three plug-ins I wanted wouldn’t install because WordPress was too out of date.

    Naturally, my next plan of action was to update WordPress. This was more challenging than I expected. I couldn’t update via WordPress, there were no app updates through the package center. I downloaded the latest copy from WordPress, SSH’d into the Synology and overwrote the WordPress files. That worked, kind of.

    WordPress was no showing up to date, but I had to fix permissions on all of the files to get the site to work, Updates were still weren’t working the way WordPress intended, so I decided to abandon the built in package and try manually.

    Using web station, I created a new site, created a database manually, copied the WordPress files. It took a lot of persuasion, but I was able to get WordPress running as expected without the built-in apps. I’ll dive into more details later, but if you’re frustrated with Synology’s built-in WordPress option, you are right to be so. Don’t do that, set it up manually in Web Station.